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Hardware Review

MX Revolution

Logitech bills the MX Revolution as the “World’s Most Advanced Mouse.” It’s
certainly loaded with gee-whiz features and buttons, but does it really live
up to the name? Not quite.

The gloss-black and matte surfaces make a nice combination, but tough luck
if you’re left-handed.

The mouse is comfortable enough to use, shaped nicely, and made with quality
materials that feel good to the touch. Logitech gets points for that, to be
sure. But why on earth does a mouse that purports to be the “world’s most
advanced” use a proprietary RF transceiver instead of Bluetooth? The
transceiver occupies a USB port on your Mac, which may be a problem if you’re
short on ports (especially if you’re buying this to replace, for example,
Apple’s wireless Mighty Mouse). It’s also another thing that can get lost
easily; many pointing devices from Logitech’s main competitors have a small
recess to store the transceiver during transport, but the Revolution has no
such feature.

There’s nowhere to store the USB transceiver in the base of the mouse, but
there is an On/Off switch to save the battery when you’re away from the
mouse.

Design-wise, the Revolution isn’t going to win any awards, but it looks
attractive enough in dark gray and gloss black. The giant Logitech logo on top
of the mouse doesn’t do it any favors, though, and the ergonomic shape is only
ergonomic if you’re part of the 90 percent of the population that’s
right-handed. Mouse tracking, which uses an 848-nm infrared laser (“DANGER: DO
NOT LOOK INTO INVISIBLE BEAM WITH REMAINING EYE”), is superb on a variety of
surfaces, as one would expect. If you’re going to be away from the mouse for a
while, there’s an On/Off switch on the bottom that allows you to save the
battery by turning the mouse off entirely.

The MX Revolution would look much better without that logo in the middle.

Battery life, by the way, is pretty good; I’m on the road half the week and I
don’t take the mouse with me, but I easily got two weeks of usage between
overnight charges. There’s a nifty LED battery indicator built into the side
of the mouse, just to the left of that big Logitech logo. It kicks on whenever
the mouse is moved, and automatically turns off after about three seconds
(whether the mouse is moving or not). The Logitech software can also tell you
the battery level, along with the estimated remaining time before you’ll need
to recharge.

One of Logitech’s selling points for the Revolution is the unique scroll
wheel, which can be toggled between a “slow” scrolling mode with a distinct
mechanical “click” in the wheel, which was pretty much a universal standard
when scroll-wheel mice were introduced, and a free-spinning “fast” mode that
allows for much quicker scrolling, at least in theory. It’s a neat feature,
but starts to feel gimmicky after a while, probably because it has two major
problems.

The Revolution’s scroll wheel is not clickable, but the button behind it
is.

First, the way you toggle between modes is by pressing the scroll wheel. This
means the scroll wheel isn’t a middle-click button as it is with most
scroll-wheel mice. To make up for this loss, Logitech put a slim button in the
middle of the mouse just aft of the scroll wheel. Further compounding the
problem is the default assignment of this extra button to the “One-Touch
Search” feature, meaning that if you click it in an attempt to middle-click
something, you’ll get a Spotlight window in the Finder instead. It can be
programmed for a Command-click using the Logitech software, but the position
of the button is far enough toward the palm that people with average-sized
hands will find it uncomfortable to reach that far.

Second, the click-scrolling mode doesn’t always give consistent scrolling
results. It’s possible to scroll downward one or two clicks and see the active
document moving in the opposite direction by a line or two. It’s also possible
to spin the scroll wheel hard enough (without pushing down on it) that it
spins right out of the slow mode and into fast-scrolling mode, where it
remains until you move the wheel again. Whether this is a bug or a feature is
debatable, but it results in behavior that is inconsistent from a user’s point
of view, and I personally don’t prefer it.

The scroll wheel can be tilted sideways to scroll horizontally, which is nice,
although I miss the feature in Kensington’s drivers (I’ve been using
Kensington mice for 10 years now) that allowed the Shift key to toggle the
scroll direction. The two arrow buttons above the thumb notch are mapped by
default to Command-Left/Right Arrow, which functions nicely as a shortcut for
Back or Forward in most browsers.

The Revolution includes a thumb “wheel” and two additional buttons on the
side.

The thumb scroll “wheel,” which is a spring-loaded switch rather than a wheel,
is assigned to activate Dashboard by default. Finding this less than useful, I
mapped its forward behavior to “Cruise Up” and its back behavior to “Cruise
Down,” which allows you to scroll the document under the cursor without moving
your hand. This fulfills my scrolling needs nicely, but makes me wish there
were a proper, clickable middle button on the top of the mouse even more. The
thumb button is also a little bit difficult to use sometimes without
accidentally clicking another button because the centering spring in it is so
stiff.

Logitech’s latest mouse software isn’t awful, but it’s not great, either.
About the best thing that can be said for it is that at least it’s no longer
guilty of breaking popular software or being a haxie that relies on
unsupported, buggy third-party frameworks to do its job (both of which it has
done in the past). It’s slower and less convenient to use than Kensington’s
driver software, and it still insists on installing an InputManager (a buggy,
earlier version of which was responsible for the problems with Growl). Like
most mouse driver software on Mac OS X, however, it’s completely unnecessary
if you’re OK with the default button actions, so simply refusing to install it
is an option. So is spending $15–20 on ControllerMate or USB Overdrive, but that’s
certainly no excuse for a manufacturer to be bundling such poor software with
a $100 mouse, or to be writing such poor software in the first place.

The MX Revolution is a good enough piece of hardware, but it really needs
Bluetooth and a proper means of middle-clicking to be considered in any
discussion of “advanced” mice. All the extra buttons don’t make up for the
lack of these important basics. As with most “ergonomic” mice, left-handed
users need not apply, and the software still leaves a lot to be desired. For
$100, unless you absolutely loathe Microsoft or Kensington hardware, you can
do a lot better.

Reader Comments (4)

To state a little better what Lally is trying to say, I have used a couple of Bluetooth-enabled mice. I have no technical knowledge to be able to say what the problem might be, but every one of the BT mice I've tried exhibited occasional reception issues where the pointer would briefly not respond. True, only milliseconds, but definitely perceptible. The only time I ever have trouble with the proprietary RF is when the batteries in the mouse are getting low. Based on what I see of the pictures, and what I know of Logitech, Chris is right on with the majority of this review, but I feel missed the mark to knock it due to the lack of Bluetooth. Like Lally, I won't buy BT mice any more.

I would agree with the above. Having tried a Microsoft bluetooth mouse with my laptop I eventually ditched it and switched to using a Logitech VX Revolution.

I've been using an MX Revolution with OS X for nearly a year now and as a Mac Pro user, having the receiver permanently attached isn't an issue. However I can appreciate that for laptop users it is one more thing to lose, unlike with the VX model where the receiver can be stored safely inside the mouse.

I've had no problems at all with The Logitech Control Centre software on the Mac which was pretty much a set-it and forget-it affair. My only problem with my MX Revolution is that the rubberized coating on the right-hand side of the mouse is blistering and peeling away.